Alea iacta est

In the Beginning, Man Created God

My blogging here has become rather pointless of late, seemingly devolving into nothing more than link-whoring to Cracked.com and endless slams at the religion of Islam. (Fun but, rather pointless).

So, I thought I'd have an attempt at writing something a little more cerebral. I do, after all, have an interest in religion, and while not religious myself, find the subject endlessly fascinating.

In a multi-part blog I'm going to have a look at the three most well known religions to come out of the fertile crescent, along with a few other related elements.

Nietzsche famously declared that "God is dead".

Above: Friedrich Nietzsche. Not a fan of God. Or razors, apparently.

Not true. It would probably be more accurate to say that "God never was", or, if you like cartoon analogies (and let's face it, who the hell doesn't?), imagine the usual ending of a Scooby Doo episode where the scary villain's mask is pulled off to reveal "Old Man Milligan", but in this case, the scary villain is God, and Old Man Milligan is us.

Or something like that.

Part 1: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

If you've read your Torah, Bible, or Qu'ran, you might be under the impression that someone called Adam, (or maybe Abraham) was the first monotheist. Either way, your text will either outright say or imply it was some Jewish guy, whether he was living in a garden or not.

Probably not true. Well, to put it better, this is what we call in the business a "filthy lie".

You'll be seeing a lot of those by the end of this.

Believe it or not, it is probably more likely that the original monotheistic faith (excepting Akhenaton's brief heresy in Egypt) was Zoroastrianism, arising from the teachings of the Iranian Zoroaster.

Briefly touching on Akhenaton, he may have replaced the pantheon of Egyptian gods with one, Aten, the sun's disc, yet he also said that only the royal family was fit to worship Aten, and the common folk had to worship Akhenaten. Not only is that a cheater's way to institute monotheism, it also shows that Akhenaton was kind of a self-absorbed dickhead.

Above: Don't you wish your God was pudgy like me?

So, we go back to Zoroaster, a Persian believed to have strolled around the Iranian territories around about 1,000 BC.

In Zoroastrianism, the one god, Ahura Mazda, despite being seemingly named after a Japanese car, is seen as the source of order and truth in the universe, who encourages mortals to live of good thoughts, words and deeds, until Ahura-Mazda's final triumph, and the remaking of the universe, where all souls, even the nasty ones, will be brought to live in a rather indistinct afterlife, and we'll all live happily ever after.

Above: Remember a time when Iranian religious figures weren't mindless bigots? Zoroaster does!

As an added bonus, traditional Zoroastrianism doesn't seek converts, making them far less annoying than the religions that were to follow.

So it all sounds fairly simple, and not too bad. Unfortunately, just like a computer program, the first release was ahead of its time and revolutionary, and the later releases would go on to completely forget this original design and create kludgy, buggy messes, littered with additional "features" that no one wanted nor asked for.

As you will soon see.

COMING UP NEXT: Part 1: YHWH Rules, Chemosh Drools!

Posted by Quentin George at June 24, 2008 10:13 PM